Bay Area

Unhoused Residents Claim OPD Harassment During Covid-19 Pandemic

Published

5 years ago

April 30, 2020

The Oakland Police Department in Downtown Oakland.

Unhoused Oakland residents say that officers from the Oakland Police Department (OPD) have been harassing and arresting them unjustly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’re essential workers. We provide outreach to the community. There is no way, shape, form, or fashion we should even have been in that situation,” said unhoused resident Yanna Johnson, speaking of an incident on the evening of Friday, April 24 when police briefly detained her and arrested Leon Young, who is also unhoused, outside of The East Oakland Collective’s (EOC) headquarters near MacArthur Boulevard and 78th Avenue in East Oakland.

Before the incident, Johnson and Young had just finished doing work to provide essential needs to other unhoused people at risk for contracting COVID-19 who are temporarily sheltered in hotel rooms. EOC and Housing and Dignity Village (HDV), organizations that advocate for unhoused people, have fundraised to temporarily shelter those who are unsheltered and at risk for contracting COVID-19 at three different hotels.

Johnson and Young are lifelong Black Oakland residents. Needa Bee of HDV, who was helping at the hotels and was at the scene while the incident occurred says the police action was racially motivated.

“They targeted the Black folks who happened to be driving a luxury car that we got donated due to the work we’re doing,” said Bee.

Young says he was arrested due to a case of mistaken identity.

“[The officers] kept calling me this name: Emory, Emory, over and over again,” Young said.

One officer pointed a gun at Young’s face during the arrest.

“I got to fearing for my life,” said Young.

“Officers detained an individual at gunpoint who they believed at the time matched the description of a person wanted in connection with a prior shooting,” OPD media wrote in an email to Bay Area reporter Darwin BondGraham.

The same email also states that while “the officers determined he was not the shooting suspect,” Young was still transported to Santa Rita Jail because he had a no-bail warrant out in connection with an unrelated charge. He was released at eight the next morning.
Video of the incident that EOC’s Candice Elder posted to Facebook shows that some police did not wear masks during the incident and none wore gloves even while touching people. The Oakland Post emailed OPD media and asked if officers are required to wear gloves and masks in contact situations to protect themselves and the public from COVID-19 but have not yet heard a response.

In West Oakland, unhoused people living on and near Wood Street say there has been an increased police presence. Dayton Andrews of The United Front Against Displacement, a group that does clean up work around Wood Street and has recently installed handwashing stations and freshwater tanks at the site, says he’s seen police on site every weekend since shelter-in-place has started.

One unhoused Oakland resident told The Oakland Post his RV got stolen from Wood Street one night in mid-April so he sought shelter by putting pillows and a blanket in a van he said was “stripped and appeared abandoned.”

The resident said he saw a police officer and tried to tell him about his stolen RV, but while he was telling his story, the officer ran the VIN number on the van, which he found to be stolen, and arrested him for possession of a stolen vehicle, jailing him for a night. But the resident says he didn’t know the van was stolen.

Also in West Oakland, in the morning of April 24th and on 3rd and Peralta Streets, unhoused Oakland resident Paul Taj Schrager said that OPD and city workers pressured him to quickly move his three vehicles which blocked access to CalTrans land without, at first, offering to give him any aid with moving. The vehicles housed five people and his possessions, but one didn’t run.

“[They said] that we had an hour to move everything, and if not they’d come back with tow trucks. They were not very nice about it at all,” said Schrager.

Markaya Spikes, who lives nearby in a self-made home and says she had had previous interactions with the officers present, approached and helped mediate the situation. After discussion, Schrager says they agreed to let him into a city-sanctioned safe parking site.

When The Oakland Post contacted Schrager on April 27, he said he and the people he lives with never made it into the safe parking site. Instead, they moved to the other side of the street from where they had stayed previously.

“I was starting to pack and getting set to go, but I spoke with a person [at the safe parking site] that said I couldn’t just drive in,” said Schrager.

Zack Haber

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Oakland Post: Week of May 21 – 27, 2025

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of May 21 – 27, 2025

Published

5 hours ago

May 25, 2025

Oakland Post

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Chevron Richmond Installs Baker Hughes Flare.IQ, Real-time Flare Monitoring, Control and Reduction System

While the sight of flaring can cause concern in the community, flares are essential safety systems that burn pollutants to prevent them from being released directly into the atmosphere. They activate during startup and shut-down of facility units or during upsets or equipment malfunctions. The typical flare stack is about 200 feet high so that vapors are well above street levels.

Published

6 days ago

May 19, 2025

Oakland Post

Image courtesy The Richmond Standard.

The Richmond Standard

Chevron Richmond recently installed flare.IQ, a real-time, automated system that will improve the facility’s flaring performance.

The technology, developed by Panametrics, a Baker Hughes business, uses sensors to monitor, reduce and control flaring in real time. It collects and assesses data on refinery processes, such as temperature, pressure, gas flow and gas composition, and adjusts accordingly to ensure flares burn more efficiently and cleanly, leading to fewer emissions.

“The cleaner the flare, the brighter the flame can look,” said Duy Nguyen, a Chevron Richmond flaring specialist. “If you see a brighter flame than usual on a flare, that actually means flare.IQ is operating as intended.”

“A key element in Baker Hughes’ emissions abatement portfolio, flare.IQ has a proven track record in optimizing flare operations and significantly reducing emissions,” said Colin Hehir, vice president of Panametrics, a Baker Hughes business. “By partnering with Chevron Richmond, one of the first operators in North America to adopt flare.IQ, we are looking forward to enhancing the plant’s flaring operations.”

The installation of flare.IQ is part of a broader and ongoing effort by Chevron Richmond to improve flare performance, particularly in response to increased events after the new, more efficient hydrogen plant was brought online in 2019.

Since then, the company has invested $25 million — and counting — into flare minimization. As part of the effort, a multidisciplinary refinery team was formed to find and implement ways to improve operational reliability and ultimately reduce flaring. Operators and other employees involved in management of flares and flare gas recovery systems undergo new training.

“It is important to me that the community knows we are working hard to lower emissions and improve our flaring performance,” Nguyen said.

Also evolving is the process by which community members are notified of flaring incidents. The Community Warning System (CWS), operated by Contra Costa County is an “all-hazard” public warning system.

Residents can opt-in to receive alerts via text, e-mail and landline. The CWS was recently expanded to enable residents to receive notifications for “Level 1” incidents, which are considered informational as they do not require any community action.

For more information related to these topics, check out the resources included on the Chevron Richmond, CAER and Contra Costa Health websites. Residents are also encouraged to follow @chevronrichmond and @RFDCAOnline on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter), where additional information may be posted during an incident.

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Oakland Hosts Town Hall Addressing Lead Hazards in City Housing

According to the city, there are 22,000 households in need of services for lead issues, most in predominantly low-income or Black and Latino neighborhoods, but only 550 to 600 homes are addressed every year. The city is hoping to use part of the multimillion-dollar settlement to increase the number of households served each year.

Published

7 days ago

May 18, 2025

Oakland Post

iStock.

By Magaly Muñoz

The City of Oakland’s Housing and Community Development Department hosted a town hall in the Fruitvale to discuss the efforts being undertaken to remove lead primarily found in housing in East and West Oakland.

In 2021, the city was awarded $14 million out of a $24 million legal settlement from a lawsuit against paint distributors for selling lead-based paint that has affected hundreds of families in Oakland and Alameda County. The funding is intended to be used for lead poisoning reduction and prevention services in paint only, not water or other sources as has been found recently in schools across the city.

The settlement can be used for developing or enhancing programs that abate lead-based paint, providing services to individuals, particularly exposed children, educating the public about hazards caused by lead paint, and covering attorney’s fees incurred in pursuing litigation.

Most of the homes affected were built prior to 1978, and 12,000 of these homes are considered to be at high risk for lead poisoning.

City councilmember Noel Gallo, who represents a few of the lead-affected Census tracts, said the majority of the poisoned kids and families are coming directly from neighborhoods like the Fruitvale.

“When you look at the [kids being admitted] at the children’s hospital, they’re coming from this community,” Gallo said at the town hall.

In order to eventually rid the highest impacted homes of lead poisoning, the city intends to create programs and activities such as lead-based paint inspections and assessments, full abatement designed to permanently eliminate lead-based paint, or partial abatement for repairs, painting, and specialized cleaning meant for temporary reduction of hazards.

In feedback for what the city could implement in their programming, residents in attendance of the event said they want more accessibility to resources, like blood testing, and information from officials about lead poisoning symptoms, hotlines for assistance, and updates on the reduction of lead in their communities.

Attendees also asked how they’d know where they are on the prioritization list and what would be done to address lead in the water found at several school sites in Oakland last year.

City staff said there will be a follow-up event to gather more community input for programming in August, with finalizations happening in the fall and a pilot launch in early 2026.